IN CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN BAYLEY

We meet the design guru and cultural commentator

By Delilah Khomo21 December 2012

For as long as I can remember, I have been helplessly engrossed with the look of things, whether a ketchup bottle or a temple, a woman or car, confesses Stephen Bayley. One of our countrys most illustrious design and cultural commentators, Bayley's prolific career has encompassed the creation of the Boilerhouse Project with Sir Terence Conran, Britains first permanent exhibition of design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1980, and the foundation of the Design Museum. Alongside this, his work as a bestselling author, columnist, consultant, broadcaster and curator have secured him the joky title of "the second most intelligent man in Britain" (an accolade he admits is controversial and probably untrue).

His Dictionary of Idiocy: An Utterly Quirky Guide to General Ignorance is packed with witty and eclectic insights on topics as diverse as political correctness and keeping a mistress, providing an instant fix of cultural and intellectual enlightenment. The book is a catalogue of opinions, facts and snippets of cultural history, and as Bayley suggests, If youre going out to dinner and have nothing to say, you could pick a page at random and have some interesting talking points.

Press Bayley, and he'll confess that his Dictionary is really an homage to the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, a writer he much admires. Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet focuses on a quest for knowledge and his Dictionnaire des Idees Reçues ridiculed the cliches beloved by the French bourgeoisie. Bayley defines his 21st-century interpretation as an educated joke, or semi-educated joke, or perhaps an extremely educated, un-funny joke.

And as he points out, An idiot in an historic sense is not a stupid person; the root is the same as idiosyncratic, implying an idiot is someone who stands out from the crowd. The term got derailed, perverted and hijacked to suggest somebody stupid. It really means someone who stands out, has a point of view or behaves differently.

But then Bayley makes a specialism of challenging our preconceptions. His book Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything, interrogated the concept of ugliness (without which, there can be no beauty), while Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below analysed the female body as symbol and sign. His books make you question the aesthetics of everything you see and what determines your taste. As Tom Wolfe succinctly said: I don't know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design.

By Delilah Khomo

Bayley on kissing

The kiss, according to F.Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up (1945), originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before. This is not quite so fanciful as it sounds. Entomologists believe that the interaction of antennae during the sexual intercourse of snails and insects is in its nature a sort of kiss. Certainly, the kiss (from Old English cyssan, to press or touch with the lips, in token of affection, greeting, or reverence), seems to be common to all mammals, but not to the Japanese. According to the exotic Lafcadio Hearn in Out of the East (1985), Kisses and embraces are simply unknown in Japan as tokens of affection. In Rome the kiss was more a sign of reverence and respect than a means of sexual excitation. In some parts of the world, the olfactory kiss is far more common than the tactile kiss. Lapps and Yakuts like to sniff each other than put their tongues in each others mouths. Swahili boys are taught to raise their loincloths as a salutation to women visitors who customarily smell their penises. The Chinese traditionally regard the European kiss as disgustingly suggestive of cannibalism. Indeed, even in some European cultures there is a sadistic element to kissing; in Penthesilea Heinrich Kleists heroine remarks that (in German) the word for kiss rhymes with bite, and adds solemnly that when you are in love the heart may easily confuse the two. Japans repudiated minority, the hairy Ainu, much prefer biting to kissing. In his esoteric study, Alone with the Hairy Ainu (1893), A.H. Savage Landor reports an episode with a hairy Ainu girl who started nibbling his little finger and got herself so worked-up in a sequential process that she ended up biting his cheeks and all parts in between. Kissing is culturally specific: Tamils prefer to rub noses rather than kiss during sexual intercourse and kissing of any kind is unknown among the north-American Indians. So where did the contemporary erotic kiss  also known as tongue sushi, a preppy expression for French Kissing  come from? According to Compayre in his LEvolution intellectuelle at mortale de lenfant (1893), the origin of the kiss is in the childs attraction to the maternal nipple: a basic association of well-being is extended to any desired object which is then sucked or licked.The modern erotic kiss is a sign of high refinement and is only practised in civilisations where the cultivation of pleasure is considered a proper cultural pursuit. In The Perfumed Garden, it is said that a moist kiss is better than a hasty coitus. It is the relationship between the erotic kiss and a high state of civilisation that makes the tepid English talk about the French kiss. Mistinguett, Queen of the Paris Music Hall, explained its subtlety in an interview with Theatre Review in December 1955: A Kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. Thats basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

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